Category Archives: Working

Trust: My Theory of Everything, from 1995

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The recent talk about “trust” with regard to the transportation sales tax referendum reminds me of one of my earliest columns for The State‘s editorial page. This ran on Feb. 7, 1995. I had only been on the editorial board a year at the time. Back then, board members rarely wrote columns; I was the only one to do so on a regular basis — I just couldn’t hold back. (Fellow Associate Editor Kent Krell called me “the Energizer Bunny” behind my back.) When I became editorial page editor two years later, I started requiring associate editors to write at least a column a week.

Anyway, while the headline was amazingly boring, I still like the column, and wouldn’t change a word of it:

Shortage of trust underlies most current problems

BRAD WARTHEN
Associate Editor

British Prime Minister John Major says the Irish peace process is threatened by a lack of trust among the Protestants of Ulster.

Well, we can’t help him with that one. American citizens have been pretty good about supplying weapons to Irish killers over the years, but we can’t spare any trust just now. We’re fresh out.

In fact, I am increasingly convinced that virtually every social problem we have in America arises from a shortage of that commodity.

The more I think about this, the more it seems like a universal principle: When mutual trust is high, society runs smoothly; when trust is low, it doesn’t. That sounds simple, but when it first occurred to me, I was startled to realize how much it explained. It seemed the sociopolitical equivalent of the unified field theory that physicists seek.

Look around. Depending on who we are, we don’t trust : the rich, the poor, the congressman, the congresswoman, the teacher, the student, older people, younger people, TV, newspapers, the courts, the police, the boss, the employees, liberals, conservatives, the guy next door, the guy across town, the guy walking down the sidewalk toward us, feminists, preachers, lawyers, doctors, businesses or customers.

A lack of basic trust of each other explains why:

  • We have so many laws, and so many lawyers. We trust nothing to common sense.
  • Thirty years after the Civil Rights Act, black and white Americans still seem to be at odds on so many fronts. So we have affirmative action and racially gerrymandered legislative districts.
  • Feminists continue to believe that a “glass ceiling” keeps women down.
  • Political discourse has gotten ugly. We no longer trust people who disagree with us to speak in good faith.
  • We want term limits, spending caps and other ways of putting government on autopilot. (We don’t trust either elected representatives or our fellow voters.)
  • We buy so many guns and build so many prisons.
  • We call the cops rather than tell those kids on the corner to “cut that out!”

It’s why we form taxpayer advocacy groups. We don’t trust government with our money.

Government! Why, we don’t trust government to do anything right, and we almost never think of the government as us anymore, as though the great American experiment in self-government were over. Now, government seems to many of us like this menacing thing out there, an intruder to be cast out of our lives. Yet what is “government” but the means by which we come together to decide, as a people, how we will live with one another?

Basically, we’ve lost faith in most of the institutions, large and small, through which our public life once found meaning.

It wasn’t always like this. There was a time, just a generation or two ago, when people sort of took it for granted that the rest of the world wasn’t out to get them. Back during the Depression, people were poor, but they didn’t resent it too much because they looked around and saw other people were poor, too. Then we beat Hitler and imperial Japan, and our greatest weapon was our ability to pull together in trusting teamwork. The government asked us not only to pay our taxes but place further trust in it by buying war bonds, and we did. The government told us that the boys at the front needed rubber and steel more than we did, and we went without and conducted drives.

After the war, we found even more reasons to trust government and the larger society. Government policies, paired with an exponentially expanding economy, helped create the affluent middle class of the ’50s and ’60s through enactment of bold policies in the late ’40s, such as the GI bill and subsidized low-interest mortgages.

Citizens who had been left out of what prosperity had existed before in America were given a fair shot at the American dream for the first time — partly because of court and congressional action, but mostly because the majority of Americans were convinced that it was wrong to treat people differently because of skin color.

So what happened? A lot. We fought a war that, instead of pulling us together, pulled us apart. Leveling the playing field between black and white didn’t level social and economic inequities, and we’re still fighting over why. A President was brought low, and people started looking at their leaders in a different way. Women sought equity with men at the same time that a shifting economy forced them into the workplace whether they wanted to be there or not. And yes, the press has had a lot to do with the decline of trust and sense of community in our society. For too long, we saw our job as being largely to tell you what was wrong with government and society so you, the voter, could fix it. We’ve focused on failures and conflict, and then we sit back and wonder why everybody seems to think society’s gone rotten. Our friends in the electronic media have done their bit, too, of course. You’d think from watching TV news that there’s nothing going on outside your door but random murders, rapes, robberies and lousy weather. So why go out and get involved?

And yet that is precisely what we must do if we’re going to fix this problem. We’ve got to unlock the door, go outside and encounter each other. We’ve got to take chances.

We have to engage – pay attention, think, run for office, circulate petitions, vote.

But first we have to believe that we can make a difference, that we can form communities rooted in good faith, that we can govern ourselves with civility. It may seem like a long shot, but it can be done. Trust me.

Clark Kent following in my footsteps

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Except, get this — the dope doesn’t get laid off. He quits The Daily Planet, a newspaper still perfectly willing to keep giving him a paycheck to do what he does, to become a blogger on purpose.

Of course, I don’t suppose he’ll starve. The whole blog business model probably works a whole lot better when you can squeeze a lump of coal into a diamond whenever your ad revenues run low.

It’s all well and good to argue with your editor over news judgment. Everybody does it. And yeah, I like the touch where you invoke “truth, justice and the American way,” in the pontifical manner of scribes everywhere. But the thing is, you come back into work the next day, when you and the editor and everybody else has forgotten yesterday’s argument, and is ready to start on today’s.

Sorry, but I guess my problem is that I spent most of my newspaper career as an editor, supervising prima donna writers, so I tend to have a bit more sympathy for the multitudinous headaches of Perry White.

Oh, and another thing, Kent: Put on a damn’ tie! Great Caesar’s Ghost..

Last night’s debate news (or part of it) this morning — another problem for what’s left of newspapers

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OK, so I’m behind the curve today. I got home from final dress rehearsal last night at about 11:30, heated up some dinner, watched a few minutes of both the beginning and the end of the debate (having heard a BBC assessment of it on the radio on the drive home) then watched some of the PBS commentary after the debate, then hit the sack.

But I’m not as far behind the curve as most daily newspapers were in today’s print editions.

Slate calls our attention to today’s front pages (all taken from the Newseum, where you can see plenty of others), which have a sameness about them: They pretty much all say the same thing in their headlines, and most run photos of the same moment, with the candidates’ fingers pointed at each other. Sure, you might find some “analysis” in there somewhere, and the more enterprising (and better-staffed) opinion pages will have some sketchy opinions expressed. As Slate’s Josh Voorhees writes:

As we explained late last night, the insta-polls and the pundits saw a tight contest on the Long Island stage on Tuesday, but one that was won narrowly by President Obama. Given the lack of a clear-cut win, however, it should come as little surprise that a quick scan of the morning’s front pages show the nation’s headline writers and art teams focused on the on-stage clash and largely left the who-won question to the domain of the cable news talking heads (as most papers had likewise done following the previous two debates).

Once, this sameness, this lack of personality or individualized expression was the glory of newspapers. If 10 different journalists from 10 different papers covered the same event, they would all write pretty much the same thing. It was a measure of their professionalism, and the self-effacement that news writing demanded of them. It was about giving it to you straight, unadorned, plain, and God forbid there should be any hint of opinion in it. Who, what, where, when, maybe how, and, if you put an “Analysis” sig on it, why.

The monotony of it didn’t strike the reading public because unless they lived near an urban newsstand, most people only saw one daily newspaper.

But here’s the problem with that today: What newspapers put in those lede headlines today, and what they conveyed in those pictures, was all old news by the time I was driving home from rehearsal last night.

I hadn’t driven more than a few blocks when I knew the conventional wisdom on what had happened. It went something like this: Obama did all the things he failed to do in the first debate, particularly having a strong finish. Romney did fine, although was maybe not quite as sharp as in the first debate. If you’re declaring a winner, it’s Obama, although I didn’t get the sense that he dominated in this debate the way Romney did in the first one, so if you’re going on cumulative totals, Romney’s probably still ahead in this debate series. How this affects the polls remains to be seen.

I had even heard about “binders full of women,” but I was mostly confused by that.

In the post-debate analysis I watched after I got home, I heard David Brooks and Mark Shields give their assessments. Brooks said Obama won because he was able to exploit Romney’s biggest weakness better than Romney was able to press Obama on his biggest weakness. He said Romney’s biggest weakness is that his numbers don’t add up, and Obama’s problem is that he never provides a vision of what the next four years will be like if he is re-elected. Shields said it might surprise everyone, but he agreed with Brooks on all those points.

Since then, on the radio this morning, I’ve heard that “Obama hasn’t sketched a vision going forward” meme several more times.

I was also interested in what a young woman (didn’t catch her name) who analyses Twitter during debates for PBS had to say. I didn’t get as much of an overview of the Twitter take as I wanted because she decided to zero in on the reactions of women. But I’ve found her assessments interesting in the past: What was trending? What were the memes people were obsessing over? What caught on? I’ve become more and more interested in the instant reactions of Tweeters in the aggregate during events like this. It has something to do with the wisdom of crowds. It’s like having sensors attached to the brains of millions of highly engaged, clever voters — which is what the most-followed people on Twitter tend to be.

And I felt left out because I wasn’t on Twitter myself during the debate. Increasingly, that’s where I like to be during these kinds of real-time shared events, sifting through the flood of reaction as it washes over me.

And in a Twitter world, seeing these front pages feels like reading ancient history. No, it’s worse than that. Historians look at the whole of a thing after it’s over and draw conclusions. There’s a wholeness to historical accounts. These reports — and I’m just reacting to the headlines, mind you — don’t do that. They give only the most noncommital account, essentially just telling you that the candidates came together and vied against one another, and there the account ends. The Des Moines Register headline (“Stakes higher in 2nd face-off”) could have been, and possibly was, written before the debate started. (And pre-Gannett, that was one of the best papers in the country for political coverage.)

And I was already so far beyond that, without even trying hard to be, last night — without even having seen the debate.

I’m not saying these papers aren’t doing their jobs well. What I’m saying is that the job they’re doing, within two kinds of constraints — the convention of not drawing conclusions in a news account, and the severe time problem of the debate ending as they have to get those pages to the press room (depending on the edition we’re talking about, a lot of editions went to bed BEFORE that) — fails to satisfy in a Twitter world.

Again, there might be all kinds of good stuff in the stories, but the presentation — the quick impression that a glance at the front page provides — is deeply lacking. It makes you not want to read more deeply. It causes me to want to go read those papers’ websites today, and see what good stuff didn’t make it into the paper. (And the better papers will have something for me when I go there.) Because the conversation has moved, by the time the paper hits your stoop, so very far beyond what’s in those headlines.

The Ron Morris/Steve Spurrier brouhaha

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Things have come to this: The other night, Mr. Darcy asked me whether Ron Morris had been fired by The State.

OK, so it wasn’t actually Mr. Darcy, who after all is a fictional character (don’t tell Bridget Jones that!), who in any case would be long dead had he ever lived. No, it was local actor Gene Aimone, who will portray Mr. Darcy in the SC Shakespeare Company’s production of “Pride and Prejudice,” which opens at Saluda Shoals Friday night. See, I can get a plug into anything.

I told him I had no idea. I wondered why he asked. He said hostilities had resumed between Coach Steve Spurrier and Ron, and that the coach had said something mysterious on the radio, or on TV, or on one of those newfangled gadgets that Mr. Darcy has no business listening to, suggesting that there would be developments forthcoming that would pleasing, at least to him.

I said I ran into Ron at Barnes and Noble several months ago and we chatted pleasantly for a time, and he appeared alive and well, and that’s the last I knew of him.

And I thought no more of it, until Neil McLean mentioned it over breakfast at Cap City this morning. Neil is the new executive director of New Carolina (replacing the retiring George Fletcher), and the son of Tom, my old boss at The State. Neil and I were talking economic development and world travel and all sorts of things, when suddenly he, too, got on the subject of Morris and Spurrier.

And I realized that I was probably the only person in South Carolina not fully briefed on this burning issue. So I went and read up on it. The State itself did not have anything on the controversy, beyond this self-effacing column by Ron (the message, in a nutshell: It was business, not personal).

Then I found this column by Dan Cook at the Free Times:

For a man who seemingly has everything — a multimillion-dollar salary and one of the most successful teams in college football, for starters, not to mention a Heisman trophy — Steve Spurrier is no doubt lacking at least one thing: a thick skin.

How else to explain Spurrier’s repeated tantrums about the writings and comments of a sports columnist, Ron Morris at The State?

At first glance — and second, third and fourth — the situation seems utterly absurd. How can the mighty Spurrier, a legendary coach revered by literally millions of college football fans, even care what a lowly local sports columnist says?

And yet, he does — apparently a lot.

Last week, it was a comparison Morris made between Penn State and the University of South Carolina that set Spurrier off.

Speaking off the cuff on Bill King’s XM radio show in response to a question about whether Spurrier would take questions at an upcoming press conference (Spurrier had recently instituted a policy of refusing questions), Morris said, “I think it’s a real test of the [USC] administration. This is how things like Penn State happen — when the administration won’t step up and confront the football coach, and he becomes all-powerful. When the football coach begins to dictate company policy, I think you’re asking for trouble.”

Spurrier responded in a later radio appearance by implying that if he had to put up with Morris any longer, he might as well retire and “head to the beach” instead. “That’s not part of the job, so we’re going to get it straightened out,” Spurrier said…

So now I see what it was about. And as I see the actual words Ron spoke, I see the matter quite differently from the Gamecock fans who have gotten so upset over it. I understand how a fan (to the extent that I can understand a sports fan, a breed not unlike political partisans, who often mystify me) would get upset if he heard, “Hey, that Ron Morris compared the Gamecock football program to the Penn State mess.” But of course, that would be a grossly unfair characterization of what he said.

To a dispassionate observer, it’s obvious that he was saying this situation was like that other in that you had a popular, successful coach, and if that popular coach becomes beyond reproach in your community, and becomes the tail that wags the dog that is your state’s flagship university, that’s a problem.

While the statement can be defended on rational grounds, there’s no question that Ron stepped in it, and that all this emotion could have been avoided if he’d just found a better way to express himself.

Of course, if he’d simply said, “Steve Spurrier’s getting too big for his breeches,” and not mentioned Penn State, he’d still be in trouble, because, well, Mr. Spurrier actually does happen to be a coach who has become beyond reproach in his community. A lot of people are fine with that state of affairs. As a skeptical journalist, Ron seems to have a problem with it. And therein lies the conflict.

Disclaimer regarding the current header

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If you’ve on the main page of this blog, you see a header image with me standing on the convention floor, next to the South Carolina delegation’s sign, at the RNC in New York in 2004 — the last convention I actually attended. At left is the uncropped image.

The photo was taken by current SC Speaker Bobby Harrell, using my camera. My left hand hovers over the head of the then-speaker, David Wilkins.

I just say that to make sure no one thinks I’m trying to fool you into thinking I personally attended the recent conventions. I did not. I just figured that, with Labor Day being behind us, this was more seasonal than the picture of the Surfside Pier I had up before.

Also, I currently have a beard, so I look like that again. Just older.

Chicago teacher union seems to be doing all that it can to undermine Obama’s re-election effort

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As we were discussing yesterday, the advantage in this election belongs to the president. But things can happen to change that. The teacher’s union in Chicago, his old stomping grounds, is doing what it can in that regard.

Not that I think it will hurt him that much, but they’re doing their best.

Why would the rest of us care about a labor dispute in Chicago, of course, except for its potential impact on a national conversation.

This is one of those moments in which Democrats and their constituencies do their best to live down to the very worst portraits that Republicans paint of them.

The Republican (or Viable Libertarian) Party dislikes public education, because it costs money, for which taxes must be paid. So it paints public education as a vast patronage machine, run by people who care little about actually educating our society, but only about their own prerogatives and self-interest. The legitimate interest of the public in an educated populace, this argument goes, is held hostage to public employee unions.

This, of course, is a grossly unfair characterization (and grossly inaccurate in SC, where we do not have collective bargaining for public employees, and therefore have no teachers’ union), except for when it is dead on.

Argue all you like about any supposedly legitimate grievances these union members have. It really doesn’t matter. When I Google “chica” — that’s all I have to type — I get a Chicago Tribune story that is encapsulated on the search page with these words: “More than 350,000 children will be locked out of Chicago public schools for a second day as striking teachers and the school board remain at…”

News stories out of Chicago are replete with the disruption to the lives of children who ought to be in school learning something. Here’s how it plays, from the Tribune story. This is in reference to the city’s effort to provide the parks as safe places for working parents to drop off their kids during the strike:

But Rachelle Cirrintano, who works at the University of Illinois at Chicago, still worried about her 8-year-old son Rocco. The boy has a hard time adjusting to change, she explained. When she dropped him off this morning, he sat on a bench alone because he didn’t know anyone.

She focused her frustration at the teachers.

“There was no reason to do this when they just got situated,” Cirrintano said. “All the teachers should be let go for their irresponsibility to the children and their families.”

And who is the wicked boss the union is striking against, as far as the world can see? Why, Rahm Emanuel, the president’s former chief of staff. The mayor’s sin was to try to implement some basic education reforms. The union claims the mayor “disrespected” it.

Republican critics of public education couldn’t have written a better script for illustrating their argument that the greatest barrier to education reform is the very people who work in public education.

Enjoying reading about the last time I was this ticked off

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At my desk at The State, evincing one of those moods./file photo from 2007

Today, grumpily wondering whether I’ll find the Democratic Convention next week as vapid, monotonous, insulting and obnoxious as I did the sliver of the GOP convention I listened to last night, I was reminded of column I wrote four years ago.

If past is prologue, it would seem the answer to my dreary question is “yes.”

That column, which ran on Aug. 31, 2008, was headlined, “Yelling at the television.” If you go back and read it, it will tell you what the rest of this week and all of next week will be like, if you find the parties as disgusting as I do.

A favorite excerpt:

What sets me off? Oh, take your pick — the hyperbole, the self-importance, the us-against-them talk, the stuff that Huck Finn called “tears and flapdoodle.”

Take, for instance, this typical bit from Hillary Clinton’s speech:

My friends, it is time to take back the country we love. And whether you voted for me or you voted for Barack, the time is now to unite as a single party with a single purpose. We are on the same team. And none of us can afford to sit on the sidelines. This is a fight for the future. And it’s a fight we must win together. I haven’t spent the past 35 years in the trenches… to see another Republican in the White House squander our promise…

Let’s deconstruct that a bit.

Take back the country? From whom? Did I miss something? Did the Russians roll right on through Gori and into Washington? No? You say Americans are still in charge, just the “wrong” Americans, of the wrong party? But your party controls Congress! Take it back from whom?

… a single party with a single purpose. Now there you’ve hit on the biggest lie propagated by each of the major parties, the conceit that there is something coherent and consistent about such loose confederations of often-incompatible interest groups. Did you not just spend the last few months playing with all the force you could muster upon those very differences, those very tensions — between feminists and black voters, between the working class and the wine and cheese set? What single purpose, aside from winning an election?

This is a fight… No, it isn’t, however much you love to say that. Again, I refer you to what the Russians are doing in Georgia — that’s a fight, albeit a one-sided one.

… that we must win together. Actually, that raises a particularly pertinent point, which is that the only “fights” that “must” be won are the ones in which “together” is defined as all Americans, or all freedom-loving peoples, whereas such divisive factions as your party and that other one that will meet in St. Paul militate against our being able to win such fights together.

I haven’t spent the past 35 years in the trenches… You’re absolutely right; you haven’t. So spare us the war metaphors.

… to see another Republican in the White House squander our promise… Like that’s what matters, the stupid party label. Like there isn’t more difference between you and Barack Obama in terms of philosophy and goals and experience and what you would bring to office than there is between John McCain and Joe Biden. Come on! Please!…

Sigh. Fume. Mutter.

Yep. I was thinking almost identical thoughts last night watching this convention.

I was pretty disgusted back then. Now, I enjoy reading about how disgusted I was. I always find that my writing improves with distance…

WIS takes media convergence to a new level

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wistv.com – Columbia, South Carolina |

It’s interesting — to me, anyway, as a longtime editor — to watch what’s happening as general-circulation newspapers do less of what they once did.

I recently had breakfast with Donita Todd, general manager of WIS, and her news director Rashida Jones (no, not that Rashida Jones, this Rashida Jones). They told me about some new things they were doing at the station, particularly their stepped-up investigative efforts.

But even if they hadn’t told me they were putting new effort into that direction, I would have noticed.

For instance, this morning, my attention was drawn (via Twitter, of course) to this story on the WIS website, by the station’s Jody Barr. An excerpt:

LEXINGTON COUNTY, SC (WIS) - A secret audio recording of Lexington town councilman Danny Frazier gives a detailed look inside an underground video poker operation working inside Lexington County. Frazier brags about his ability to operate illegal video poker sweepstakes businesses within Lexington County. A WIS investigation uncovers Frazier’s political connections and whether those connections are allowing him to continue doing business.

We obtained the recording from a source who secretly recorded a conversation with Frazier. The source posed as a businessman, interested in getting into the illegal video poker operation inside Lexington County. The source went undercover after fearing Lexington County law enforcement was purposefully ignoring and protecting Frazier’s operations. The recording links Frazier to at least two separate sweepstakes businesses, both near West Columbia.

The people who made the recordings tell WIS they have turned them over to state and federal authorities…

The recording indeed is fascinating. Of course, it raises a lot of questions in my mind that might not occur to some readers — questions the reporter would have had to answer for the story to get into any newspaper I ever edited.

We would have had a long, long conversation about this self-appointed Batman who went “undercover,” starting with the word itself. Can average citizens technically go “undercover?” Doesn’t the term refer to a law enforcement officer hiding the fact that that’s what he is? What does it mean when a layman does it? What are the implications? What sort of deception was involved, and to what extent does it expose the individual, or the media outlet that uses the product, to allegations of illegality? Who takes that upon himself, however lofty his motives? And speaking of that, what were his motives, and what does that tell us? (Ultimately, the test is whether the information is good, not the motives of the source. But knowing the motive could lead to relevant questions that I can’t even imagine at this point.)

And why are we concealing his identity? There may be a good reason, but I’d like to hear it.

I’d also like to know whether the recording, obtained as it was, could possibly have any value to the “state and federal authorities” to whom it was given. I don’t know enough to answer that question. Fortunately, it’s secondary to this story, but I do wonder.

There’s a Wild West sort of feel to this sort of investigative reporting, on its face. It reminds me of the way reporters so often are portrayed in fiction, starting with Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen in the old “Superman” TV series. They were always taking it upon themselves to try to personally catch the bad guys, rather than simply report the story. Fortunately for them, Superman was always nearby to save them when the bad guys tied them up in an abandoned warehouse.

Of course, that’s only the way it looks to me from the outside. It could be that the folks at WIS who decided to go with this have very good answers to all of the questions I raise — I just can’t tell, as the reader.

There is one thing in the story that makes me feel better about reporting the contents of the recording — and I suspect is what made WIS management feel OK about the story — it’s that Danny Frazier, incredibly, “admitted to the recording.” Although I’m not clear on to what extent he did so, since he doesn’t admit to having said what the recording seems to show him saying. But let’s say he does confirm the legitimacy of the recording itself. This, of course, raises a bunch of other questions, such as: OK, if he knows the recording is legit, then doesn’t he know who was with him when he said those things? Does he not recognize the voice? In which case, tell me again why we’re not identifying the “undercover” guy…

Of course, to the casual reader, what we have here is a fascinating glimpse into the video poker bidness in 2012, and plenty of reasons to ask questions of Jake Knotts and Jimmy Metts. And that’s where Mr. Barr sticks to the book, asking those questions of each player and dutifully recording the answers. He got some great quotes:

The sheriff said he was too busy meeting and greeting voters to pay attention to who gave to his campaign, although the contributions were maximum contributions. “Very rarely do I look at the checks,” Metts said, “I do have access to who contributed to the campaign through the computer, but really and truly, I don’t go back and look at that.”

“If you held a shotgun to my head right now and told me you were going to pull the trigger unless I told you everybody who contributed to my campaign, you’d just have to kill me,” Metts said.

Several times during the interview, Metts denied any participation in or knowledge of any of the illegal video poker businesses in his county. “I know people say, in something like that breeds corruption, but I can tell you in no uncertain terms I am not a part of any Lexington County ring, I am not part of any illegal gambling. I don’t own. I don’t receive. I’m not involved. I’m not protecting anybody. As a matter of fact, [it's] quite the opposite. I’ll put their [expletive] in jail.”…

Knotts admits Danny Frazier is a close friend whom he’s known for years, but denies any knowledge of protection for Frazier to continue to operate the illegal sweepstakes machines. “Do you have any involvement in what these tapes show that Danny Frazier may be involved in?” Barr asked. “None whatsoever,” Knotts replied.

“I’ve got contributions when I first ran, every time I’ve ever run and I don’t back away from it,” Knotts said of accepting campaign contributions from the video poker industry.

“If there’s any more money out there that any of those people want to send me, send it to me,” said Knotts. “I could take money from the devil and make it do God’s will.”

Bottom line, this new assertiveness by WIS, and by such others as the Free Times‘ Corey Hutchins, is bound to uncover a lot of fascinating stuff in our community going forward, however they go about it.

WIS is aggressively moving into the territory once held firmly by newspapers. For some time, of course, the text stories on TV websites have been more than mere come-ons for the video. And the networks, with their greater resources, have gone deeply into the realm of publishing the written word. But this sort of extended investigative report — 1,866 words, close to twice the length of one of my columns at The State — seems to go well beyond anything local television has attempted to do in the past.

People are hiding from me! On purpose! In 2012, when all info is supposed to be easily accessible!

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Yes, we live in amazing times, even though we still don’t have flying cars.

Michael Rodgers is NOT hiding.

Just one example, from today, of the sort of miracle we take for granted, but which would have sounded like the wildest sort of science fiction back in, say, 1987 — the year I came to Columbia to become governmental affairs editor.

We were kicking around an idea for a TV commercial for a potential client, and suddenly I had a sort of half-memory of having seen an ad, long ago, that did something familiar. I whipped my iPhone from its holster (and if I wanted so see Cleavon Little say, “Just let me whip dis out” in “Blazing Saddles” within a few seconds, I’d do the same), and found a reference to the ad I was thinking of within 30 seconds. Within another 30 — still using my phone (my own  personal phone that goes everywhere I go, which was conceivable in 1987 but still fantastic) — I was watching that ad on YouTube. An ad that last ran in — get ready for it — 1987.

If, in 1987, I had wanted to find out about an ad from 1962, I would have had to spend half the day or more at the library, and whether I even found a reference to it would depend on some pretty tedious guesswork with a periodicals index, and I would have to cross my fingers for a miracle hoping that the library stocked that particular publication, and kept them going back 25 years.

Kathryn Fenner is NOT hiding.

As for actually seeing the ad, without a trip to New York or L.A. and a pretty tedious search once I got there — well, I would have been s__t out of luck, to use the technical term. Oh, maybe if I reached the right person on the phone in one of those places, and they were willing to make me a VHS tape and mail it to me, I might get to see it within a week. But it would have been iffy at best.

Anyway, I say all this to express my appreciation for all the things we can so easily find and experience now, right at our fingertips.

But this post is about the things we can’t, and how frustrating that is.

Phillip Bush is NOT hiding.

Today, the very day of the 1987 ad miracle, I was looking for a mug shot for my contacts list. You know how Google Contacts and iPhones and even Blackberries and Palms allow you to attach a picture of a person to their contact info? Well, I try to take advantage of that whenever I create a new contact. It usually only takes a few seconds. (It took me maybe a minute total to find the four mugs you see here, using Google Images.) I do this because I’m terrible at keeping names and faces straight — I know, or sorta know, too many people for that. By having this feature in widely used software, we are encouraged to do this. It’s normal. (If you had tried it in 1962 — the way the dwarf character did to Mel Gibson’s character in “The Year of Living Dangerously,” keeping a dossier on him and other friends — it would have creeped people out.)

For instance, if you Google me, you get a lot of pictures that are not me, but just people associated with me, but in the first couple of pages of results, there are about 17 images of yours truly. That’s high, on account of my blog and my long association with the newspaper, but not all that high. I get similar results with a lot of people on my contacts list.

But then… every once in a while… there’s someone I can’t find. Sometimes it’s understandable. They are quiet people who work in some private business that doesn’t require a lot of public interaction. But sometimes… it’s like Winston Smith and the gang in 1984 have expunged the person from existence.

Today, it was someone who actually leads a very public organization that advocates on behalf of a very hot local political issue. I had that person’s contact info, from an email, and while I could sort of picture the person in my mind from past interactions, I wanted the crutch of having the mug shot there in case memory failed me at a critical moment.

Doug Ross is NOT hiding.

And I could not find this person anywhere. Eventually, I set my pride aside and tried her Facebook page, which for me is really last-ditch (and feels, even in 2012, even for an unreconstructed journalist, a bit like prying sometimes). And discovered that this was one of those people who not only doesn’t have her own face as her profile picture, but doesn’t have a single image in which she appears among any of her Facebook photos.

At which point I started hearing that little dee-dee-DEE-dee music from “The Twilight Zone.”

Yeah, I realize, some people are just private, as anachronistic as that is in 2012. But I don’t see how a person who is heavily involved in the community manages to disappear so completely.

Thoughts about this? Does this happen to you? Does it drive you nuts? It does me. Maybe it shouldn’t, but it does. Information is normally so extremely accessible, that when it isn’t, it just seems wrong…

The news story that was (in part) about itself

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You may or may not have seen that the finished version of the story about the ramifications of Nikki Haley’s daughter getting a PRT job finally appeared in The State today. Of course, it was far more involved and complete than the “draft” version that appeared inadvertently on the web pages of The Rock Hill Herald and (so I’m told) The Charlotte Observer last week.

In the end, the story turned out to be almost as much about itself as about the suggestion of nepotism.

While nothing can really erase the embarrassment for the newspaper of readers knowing about the story for a week before it appeared, the editors did everything they possibly could to make up for it. Most importantly, they thoroughly explored the ridiculous “controversy,” generated by the governor herself, about whether it should be published.

I particularly like the sidebar box that lists all the perfectly rational, professional questions that the newspaper had been asking the governor’s office from the beginning of this silly saga, followed by the immature, petulant, emotional statement from the governor’s office, refusing to answer those questions — all of which a public official who actually does believe in transparency would have answered immediately. Let’s quote that sidebar in full:

Questions, but no answers

Emailed questions sent by a State reporter to the governor’s office on Monday, July 16. (The State has removed the name of the governor’s daughter in the email exchange below.)

Here are my questions about (NAME REMOVED) Haley working at the State House gift shop:

When was she hired? When she did she start work? Will she continue to work at the shop after school starts?

What are her duties?

How many hours a week does she work?

How much is she paid?

Is this her first job?

Who does she report to? How many people work at the shop?

Was this job posted to the public? (If so, can I see a copy of the posting?)

Was the job budgeted? (If not, how was this job added and funded?)

Were work hours of shop employees adjusted to accommodate (NAME REMOVED)?

Why did her parents choose the gift shop as a place to work?

Some people might not think it’s fair for (NAME REMOVED) to have a job tied to a state agency where the director is appointed by her mother (PRT). Response?

If the governor’s office has concerns about (NAME REMOVED)’s safety, about the public knowing where she works, why does she have a job at one the state’s most-prominent and most-visited historical sites?

Would she have needed additional security if she got a job outside the State House?

The governor’s office response

Sent on Tuesday, June 17

What follows constitutes our office’s response for any story you plan to write regarding (NAME REMOVED) Haley.

Quote from Rob Godfrey, Haley spokesman: “The State newspaper – the reporter who wrote it, editors who approved it, and ownership who published it – should be ashamed for printing details of a fourteen year old’s life and whereabouts, against the wishes of her parents and the request of the Chief of SLED, who is ultimately responsible for her security. We have nothing more to say.”

Quote from South Carolina Law Enforcement Division Chief Mark Keel: “I have expressed my concerns, as of yesterday, that publication of information regarding minor children of elected officials creates problems for State Law Enforcement and its efforts to provide security for the children of this governor or any governor. In my 30 years-plus of experience at SLED, the security or activities of minor children of elected officials is something that the media in general has taken a ‘hands off’ approach to in reporting except as officially released by the elected official’s office.”

Did the newspaper manage to convey to you that it was going out of its way not to name the child, or do you need to get hammered over the head with (NAME REMOVED) a couple more times? No? OK, good, we’ll move on…

The story was unaccompanied by editorial comment (unless you count Mark Lett’s statement of the newsroom’s thinking on publishing the story), but for anyone able to put two and two together, the lesson to be learned here is obvious: This governor, when backed into a corner, will use hypocritical obfuscation in an effort to manipulate an emotional backlash reaction from her base so that she can hide behind it, rather than give straight answers.

Most telling on that score was the fact that Gov. Haley herself has consistently disclosed information about her children and their doings, even to providing the name of her daughter’s orthodontist — and yet has the nerve to (apparently) induce the head of SLED to say, absurdly, that disclosing that her daughter has a job that is just outside the governor’s office and protected by more than one layer of security somehow threatens her safety. Yes, any information published about any person’s whereabouts could, conceivably, make that person marginally less safe. So maybe the governor will think about that in the future when she posts on Facebook.

Substantively, in terms of the bare bones of the original story, what this story contained that last week’s draft did not were some basic facts that Nikki provided to the Charleston paper after refusing to answer The State (more petulance): such as her daughter’s hours, and what she was being paid. (Actually, the Charleston story turned out to be less about the governor, and more about the continuing, puzzling absence of the story from The State.)

No one who brought the draft story to my attention ever mentioned the one significant fact that was missing from it: What the child was being paid, or even whether she was being paid. This seems to be what held up the story. I think that’s a lousy excuse to hold the story– I would simply have written, we don’t know whether she’s being paid because the officials who should tell us refuse to — but it does seem to explain the delay. As soon as it had that information, from the third party, the paper ran the story.

Nikki Haley will continue, to the extent she acknowledges this story’s subject, to try to dupe her base into rage that the paper intruded on her child’s privacy.

But to anyone with even a rudimentary capacity for reason, it should be obvious that this story, now that it has finally appeared, is not about a child. It’s about the governor’s childishness.

Only Robinson Crusoe did it alone — and then only until Friday came along

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And note that not even he made the musket, or the hatchet.

Since I’m not at the paper any more, it fell to Cindi Scoppe to write this column that ran today, basically addressing the orgy of indignation among the libertarians who call themselves conservatives over President Obama’s unfortunate choice of words in explaining the painfully obvious fact that practically no one in our crowded, interdependent world achieves anything worthwhile alone:

A LOT OF what the president says and does is ripe for criticism. But what he said the other day about no one being an island, about how our parents and our communities and our teachers and mentors and, yes, our government all contributed to our success is not one of those things.

If you’re wondering who in the world would criticize such obvious commentary, it’s because you don’t recognize the full context of that bizarre, ridiculous, one hopes bungled quote that came in the middle of it: “If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”…

Of course business owners built their businesses — unless they inherited them or bought them from someone who did. Their initiative and hard work and luck set them apart.

As important as parents are to our success, one sibling can create a multi-billion-dollar business while another languishes on welfare. As much as we need good teachers, even the best have some students who drop out of school. Although government policy can give some businesses a leg up, others can go bankrupt even with too-generous government grants.

That’s because some people have initiative, and some do not. Some people are creative, and some are not. Some people are smart, and some are not. And while the schools can affect which group any individual is in, government does not eliminate those basic differences.

At the same time though, the vast majority of people who own businesses would not have been able to do that if we didn’t have a monetary system and a court system and roads and police and other functions of government. The vast majority of people who have any sort of success would not have it in a world without government. In fact, they wouldn’t have it if not for the peculiar kind of government that our country embraced from the start: self-government.

Can, and should, our government be more efficient? Of course so. Is there room to debate whether the government should bail out the banks or the auto industry or help pay for our medical care? By all means. Is there a legitimate question as to whether taxes are too high or too low? Certainly.

But the vast majority of Americans would not have the lives we take for granted — lives that are inconceivably luxurious compared to the lives lived by the overwhelming majority of people throughout human history — if it weren’t for our flawed but better-than-any-alternatives government.

Seems to me Cindi was being slightly over-cautious in saying that only “the vast majority of people” would have gotten nowhere without the basic conditions — civil order, rule of law, basic infrastructure — that are provided through the processes we call “government.” I suppose there are some to whom that doesn’t apply, but very few. It’s even harder to think of anyone who accomplished anything worthwhile completely and utterly alone — without anyone, whether you’re talking about government or not.

I suppose there’s Robinson Crusoe — that is, until Friday came along. This reminds me of an economics exercise we did in high school. We had to suppose we were stranded on a desert island, and we had to allocate our resources — which included time, and effort — so as to survive. This much time building a shelter out of available materials meant that much less time spent gathering food. X amount of time spent making a tool that would facilitate building that shelter cuts the construction time, leaving more time to weave a net to make fishing easier, etc.

A castaway who is completely alone can create something useful — to him, anyway — without anyone else’s involvement. But a business, in our crowded society? Well, to start with, you have to have customers. And then, depending on your business, there are suppliers, and vendors providing services that it would be inefficient to perform yourself. And as you grow, there are employees who become essential to your further growth, etc. Without the willing participation of those often vast networks of people, you can work and create all you want, but you’re not getting anywhere.

The extreme libertarians would put government in another category from just “people.” But in our system, the government and the people are the same thing. “Government” is just the word for the set of arrangements that we have among us, the people, for handling certain things that are best handled that way, such as building roads or deepening a port or passing and enforcing the laws without which the concept of private property is meaningless.

In fact, if I had a quibble with Cindi’s column, it would be that, in her litany of things for which government is essential, she kept referring to government as “it.” As in, “It creates and maintains a monetary system,” and “It provides a civil justice system…”

Given the screwy way so many of our neighbors these days think of government, that can be misunderstood as government being some separate entity that provides certain things to us, the people. But it’s not that at all. A better word than “it” would be “we,” because government is simply the process through which we create and maintain a monetary system, provide a civil justice system, and so forth.

Government does not give or take away. It’s just the arrangements through which we, the people, do certain things that we decide, through our system of representative democracy, are best done that way.

Driveby Beat, Hawaiian Style: Thanks for sharing, Burl!

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On a previous post, I noted that years ago I lobbied for creation of a “driveby beat” at The State — to have a reporter dedicated to answering people’s understandable curiosity about things they drove by and wondered about in the Midlands. It would have been a wonderful way to root the paper and readers solidly in the community, aside from telling people something they actually wanted, and occasionally perhaps even needed, to know.

Also, it would satisfy my own curiosity about a lot of things, which to my mind was, to a great extent, what reporters were for. There was always that.

Anyway, it never happened — although I saw that today, The State actually did have a story about what was going on at the State Fairgrounds, which I had driven by and wondered about just yesterday.

Anyway, when I brought it up, Burl Burlingame noted that he actually used to have such a beat, which was his idea (it must have been subliminal planted in both our brains at Radford High School) at the Honolulu Star-Bulletin. Here and here and here are some links.

And here’s an excerpt from his “Wat Dat” (I don’t think I’ll have to translate that pidgin for you) feature:

Somebody whose name we can’t read – but who does draw a nice map – was curious about a brown statue or chimney standing at the end of row of trees just north of the Mililani exit.
It is a statue, and it’s of a tree trunk, rising more than 30 feet above a circular grassy platform, which is in turn surrounded by a large gravel walkway, which is atop a tall wall – kind of a rounded ziggurat – which is accessed by a grand tile stairway, which is approached by carefully tended Japanese gardens, which are guarded by carefully repaired antique marble Chinese lions, which are flanked by enormous granite slabs, which cap hobbit-like stools and benches that seem to be made out of logs but are really cast cement, which are parked beneath a series of carefully tended trees, which have the names of local politicians inscribed upon signs at the foot of each.

The area is grand and imposing, and at the same time intimate and quiet. It’s also generally deserted, which adds to the otherworldly experience.

This is one of the WatDatiest of WatDats to come along in some time!

The site is the local mission of the Honbushin Honbu, a Shinto religious sect with nearly a million followers, mostly in Japan. There is also a mission in China…

The “sculpture” is a koa log that seems to be protected by a coat of brown paint. It’s called “GENTEN,” which, translated from Japanese, means roughly “starting point” or “origin.”

The sculpture represents nature and the unity of hearts, religions and countries that work toward peace. Honbushin missionaries regularly gather around the genten and pray…

Of course, in Hawaii, the stuff you drive by and wonder about has a tendency to be slightly more exotic than what we have around here…

Haley suspended mayor who allegedly hired son

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Catching up with e-mail (my inbox is down to 296!), I came across one from several days back, from one of a number of readers who remain puzzled as to why The State still hasn’t published Gina Smith’s now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t story about Nikki Haley’s daughter getting a job working for an agency she supervises.

I wonder about it myself. But that’s not what this post is about. What it’s about is something else I had missed, and which this reader was attempting to bring to my attention:

The Associated Press

NORWAY, S.C. — The mayor of the Orangeburg County town of Norway has been indicted on charges of misconduct in office and nepotism.

Gov. Nikki Haley has suspended Jim Preacher from office while the charges are pending.

The indictment says Preacher gave himself a raise without the approval of the town council and hired his son at the town’s water treatment department…

There was more to it than that, including a bizarre alleged interaction between the mayor and a state trooper. One senses that more than nepotism brought the mayor to this pass. But what struck me was the irony that the governor has suspended this guy who among other things is charged of providing his son with a job in a department that apparently is under his purview.

Yet, in the story that briefly appeared in the Rock Hill Herald before disappearing, we found this:

State law prohibits public officials from causing the employment of a family member to a position they supervise or manage, according to the State Elections Commission. However, Haley does not supervise the gift shop; she supervises the agency that operates it, making the teen’s summer job permissible, an attorney with the commission said.

Really? So we’re to suppose that the governor’s position had nothing to do with an agency that reports to her deciding to hire a 14-year-old child?

This is a strange little story. To quote Jubal Harshaw, “this has more aspects than a cat has hair.”

Playing the unemployment blame game

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On the national level, it’s the Republicans touting high unemployment and blaming it on President Obama.

On the state level, it’s the Democrats who eagerly greet each piece of bad employment news, only they blame it on the local Republicans:

Representative Leon Stavrinakis Statement on Spike in SC Jobless Rate
Charleston, SC – South Carolina’s jobless rate rose to 9.4% in June from 9.1% in May, while Charleston County’s unemployment rate rose significantly from 7.9% last month to 8.5% in June. Charleston State Representative Leon Stavrinakis released a statement in response:
“These unemployment numbers are troubling and unacceptable for the Charleston area and the state of South Carolina as a whole. As the nation’s unemployment rate continues to drop or hold steady, South Carolina’s rate is going in the wrong direction and at an alarmingly fast rate. Perhaps Governor Haley should stop her international travels and simply attending every press opportunity she can find so she can actually put real time and work into creating jobs in South Carolina. The last place potential businesses want to relocate is a state led by a Governor who is only interested in being a celebrity, cutting education, and refusing to invest in infrastructure. We can also be sure that Governor Haley’s recent budget attacks on existing South Carolina industry are not helping our ability to attract and recruit jobs to our state. It is time for Governor Haley to quit stalling and present the legislature with a comprehensive jobs plan. If she refuses to give us a plan, I suggest she take a look at the plan I released months ago,  which to date she has not indicated she has even taken the time to read.”
###

Funny how things can look so different from Columbia (or Charleston) than they do from Washington.

An example of an op-ed rebuttal: Answering Glenn McConnell in 2007

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During the discussion on a previous post, I noted that “I have been known, on one or two occasions, to allow a source space for a full op-ed piece, even when the piece is almost 100 percent nonsense… and run a piece of my own, right across from it, demolishing it. That way the reader/voter has a chance to see that party’s full case, as well as the arguments against it.”

Bud, quite reasonably, asked, “An example would be good. Sometimes people think they demolish something but it turns out not to be the case. Let the bloggers be the judge.”

Fine. Except I could only think of a couple of cases (as I said, there were “one or two”), but I couldn’t immediately lay my hands on either one of them.

I’ve now located one of my examples. It’s not a perfect one. In this case, for instance, I didn’t rebut the op-ed piece until days later — either because I didn’t have column space until then, or because something that happened later in the week got my dander up, and caused me to recall the previous piece. I don’t know; it’s been almost five years now.

Anyway, the piece that (eventually) set me off was by Glenn McConnell, and I ran it in The State on Friday, Oct. 19, 2007. Here it is:

By Glenn F. McConnell Guest Columnist

South Carolina can only have an orderly, predictable and consistent growth rate in state spending by constitutionally mandating it. It cannot be accomplished on a reliable basis by hanging onto slim majorities in the Legislature and having the right governor. The political pressures are too great unless there is a constitutional bridle on the process.

That is the reason I created a task force to consider a constitutional amendment that would cap the growth in spending by the state. The first meeting of the Senate study committee on constitutionally capping state government spending is scheduled for 1 p.m. Wednesday in Room 105 of the Gressette Senate office building in Columbia.

There will always be more needs than revenue no matter what the economic times and the amount of available new funds. Government must, therefore, temper its conduct to spend so that over the highs and lows in revenue forecasts, the necessary revenue will be there to fund essential needs without the pressure for new taxes.

When government is flush with money, the spending goes up to fund many new initiatives — some good, some questionable and some not good. In other words, projects get funded not so much out of merit but merely because the money was available. Some one-time expenditures also occur the same way. In the face of a bountiful taxpayer buffet, government cannot control its appetite, so its stomach must be stapled.

At stake is the need to at least control the rate of growth in the recurring base. So I have introduced a constitutional amendment to cap the rate of spending of our state government. Government would be limited to growth at an amount that would not exceed the rate of population growth plus the growth in personal income. Basically, government should not grow any bigger than it needs to be or any faster than people’s ability to pay for it.

I have been an ardent supporter of both Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan, and I believe that government is best which governs least. I also believe that as much money as possible is best left in the hands of people if we are to economically advance. If people keep more, they have greater opportunities to invest and spend so our economy will expand. It is a matter of fairness.

If there are surpluses in Columbia, these should not expand the obligation to fund a growing government but instead should be used to reduce long-term debt and obligations, fund capital projects to avoid issuing costly bonds, cover one-time costs, save and carry forward for a rainy day, and/or fund tax refunds and tax cuts.

The constitutional amendment would foster growth in the private sector, challenge legislators to prioritize spending better, seek better efficiencies in the operation of government and privatize operations where it is in the state’s best interest. This will present new opportunities to create rainy-day funds, to create a more debt-free South Carolina and to replenish trust funds that too often have been tapped in lean times to fuel the insatiable appetite of government created by overspending in good times.

Finally, we all must realize that our state government, just as much as any business, has to be competitive in order to attract and retain jobs. We need to provide essential services, but we need to do it in a way that ensures excellence, efficiency and long-term cost control. Throwing dollars at an agency does not ensure that it will be better. Limiting the growth in spending ensures that the challenge for each budgeting year is to do more with what we have available rather than to spend more to get the job done.

Working together, we can give the people of South Carolina an opportunity to vote on whether they want this limitation on the growth of spending. As I said, the limitation, if adopted, would ensure our future is not one of ups and downs based on political fortunes but instead one of predictability and orderliness in the growth of South Carolina.

Mr. McConnell, a Charleston attorney and businessman, is president pro tempore of the Senate and chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee.

As I said, that ran on Friday, so I’m beginning to see what probably happened. I generally wrote my Sunday columns on Fridays. I would have read the senator’s piece — most likely for the first time — on the page proof Thursday afternoon, so it would have been quite fresh in my mind. I might have even ripped out a few grafs of my response right then, and polished them somewhat the next morning.

You’ll note, though, that my column wasn’t just a response to McConnell. I didn’t even get to him until about halfway through. This column was of a certain type, the type that puts me in mind of a line Mark Twain wrote: “And now that my temper is up, I may as well go on and abuse every body I can think of.” I always liked that line because it describes a mood that is very familiar to me.

Here’s my column that ran on Sunday, Oct. 21, 2007:
IN SOUTH CAROLINA, WE KEEP TALKING ABOUT THE WRONG THINGS

By Brad Warthen Editorial Page Editor

We always seem to be having the wrong conversations in South Carolina. Sometimes, we don’t even talk at all about the things that cry out for focused, urgent debate.

Look at this joke of a commission that was assigned to examine whether the city of Columbia should ditch its ineffective, unaccountable, “don’t ask me” form of government. It was supposed to report something two years ago. And here we are, still waiting, with a city that can’t even close its books at the end of the year. Whether its that fiscal fiasco, or the failure to justify what it did with millions in special tax revenues, or the rehiring of a cop who was said to be found drunk, naked and armed in public, there is no one who works directly for the voters who has control over those things.

But as bad as it is to have no one to blame, there is no one to look to for a vision of positive action. A city that says it wants to leap forward into the knowledge economy with Innovista really, really needs somebody accountable driving the process.

Columbia needed a strong-mayor form of government yesterday, and what have we done? Sat around two years waiting for a panel that didn’t want to reach that conclusion to start with to come back and tell us so.

It’s worse on the state level.

What does South Carolina need? It needs to get up and off its duff and start catching up with the rest of the country. There are many elements involved in doing that, but one that everybody knows must be included is bringing up the level of educational achievement throughout our population.

There are all sorts of obvious reforms that should be enacted immediately to improve our public schools. Just to name one that no one can mount a credible argument against, and which the Legislature could enact at any time it chooses, we need to eliminate waste and channel expertise by drastically reducing the number of school districts in the state.

So each time the Legislature meets, it debates how to get that done, right? No way. For the last several years, every time any suggestion of any kind for improving our public schools has come up, the General Assembly has been paralyzed by a minority of lawmakers who say no, instead of fixing the public schools, let’s take funding away from them and give it to private schools — you know, the only kind of schools that we can’t possibly hold accountable.

As long as we’re talking about money, take a look at what the most powerful man in the Legislature, Sen. Glenn McConnell, had to say on our op-ed page Friday (to read the full piece, follow the link at the end of this column):

South Carolina can only have an orderly, predictable and consistent growth rate in state spending by constitutionally mandating it. It cannot be accomplished on a reliable basis by hanging onto slim majorities in the Legislature and having the right governor. The political pressures are too great unless there is a constitutional bridle on the process.

The people of South Carolina elect 170 people to the Legislature. In this most legislative of states, those 170 people have complete power to do whatever they want with regard to taxing and spending, with one caveat — they are already prevented by the constitution from spending more than they take in.

But they could raise taxes, right? Only in theory. The State House is filled with people who’d rather be poked in the eye with a sharp stick than ever raise our taxes, whether it would be a good idea to do so or not.

All of this is true, and of all those 170 people, there is no one with more power to affect the general course of legislation than Glenn McConnell.

And yet he tells us that it’s impossible for him and his colleagues to prevent spending from getting out of hand.

What’s he saying here? He’s saying that he’s afraid that the people of South Carolina may someday elect a majority of legislators who think they need to spend more than Glenn McConnell thinks we ought to spend. Therefore, we should take away the Legislature’s power to make that most fundamental of legislative decisions. We should rig the rules so that spending never exceeds an amount that he and those who agree with him prefer, even if most South Carolinians (and that, by the way, is what “political pressures” means — the will of the voters) disagree.

Is there a problem with how the Legislature spends our money? You betcha. We don’t spend nearly enough on state troopers, prisons, roads or mental health services. And we spend too much on festivals and museums and various other sorts of folderol that help lawmakers get re-elected, but do little for the state overall.

So let’s talk about that. Let’s have a conversation about the fact that South Carolinians aren’t as safe or healthy or well-educated as folks in other parts of the country because lawmakers choose to spend on the wrong things.

But that’s not the kind of conversation we have at our State House. Instead, the people with the bulliest pulpits, from the governor to the most powerful man in the Senate, want most of all to make sure lawmakers spend less than they otherwise might, whether they spend wisely or not.

The McConnell proposal would make sure that approach always wins all future arguments.

For Sen. McConnell, this thing we call representative democracy is just a little too risky. Elections might produce people who disagree with him. And he’s just not willing to put up with that.

As you can see, that was a very South Carolina column. Everything addressed in it, everything that was getting my temper up, was something that one could just as well be said today. Because in South Carolina, very little that ought to change ever changes.

Onion gets the scoop on The Daily Planet

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This was a mildly amusing piece in The Onion yesterday:

NEW YORK—Frustrated fans of the Superman comic book said Monday the continued financial stability and cultural relevance of the series’ Daily Planet newspaper is now the most unrealistic part of its universe and an annoying distraction that has ruined their reading experience.

While they acknowledged that enjoying the adventures of a superhero who can fly, lift a bus over his head, and shoot beams of intense heat from his eyes requires some suspension of disbelief, longtime fans told reporters they simply could not accept a daily metropolitan newspaper still thriving in the media landscape of 2012.

“I can play along with Superman using a steel girder to swat someone into outer space, but I just can’t get past the idea that The Daily Planet still occupies one of the largest skyscrapers in all of Metropolis and is totally impervious to newsroom layoffs or dwindling home subscriptions,” said comics blogger Marc Daigle, adding that it was impossible for him to even look at Superman’s alter ego, Clark Kent, without immediately thinking he would have been replaced long ago by a freelancer who gets paid nine cents a word and receives no health benefits. “Every time The Daily Planetshows up, I just get taken out of the story completely. I usually flip ahead to Superman freezing a volcano with his breath or something.”…

I say “mildly” because the idea of a health Daily Planet was sufficiently absurd that it was hard to make fun of effectively.

One last excerpt:

“The least they could do is have [Daily Planet editor-in-chief] Perry White be forced into retirement by an MBA 25 years his junior,” Taft continued. “It’d be a start.”

See? Too real, too true, too matter-of-fact to be funny.

Perry! Great Caesar’s Ghost!

Only 80,000 — low jobs figure depresses markets, casts pall on Obama’s re-election

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No virtual front page today, because there’s not much I’d willingly put on a front page. The biggest story of the day by far is the softer-than-expected jobs numbers — which, combined with bad news out of Spain, has sent global markets plunging.

(The only thing competing for the front with that is Hillary Clinton talking tough to China and Russia about Syria. I might do a separate post about that.)

The BBC does the basic overview:

US shares have fallen after official data showed firms had created only 80,000 new jobs in June, leaving the jobless rate unchanged at 8.2%.

Job creation remains below the 100,000 judged necessary by the Federal Reserve for a stable job market, according to the US Labor Department.

Shares slipped after the news, with the opening Dow Jones index falling 1%.

President Barack Obama said the rise in employment was “a step in the right direction”.

Campaigning in the swing state of Ohio on Friday, President Obama acknowledged that “it’s still tough out there” for ordinary Americans…

Republican White House candidate Mitt Romney said from Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, that the jobs data underlined the need for a new president, adding “this kick in the gut has got to end”…

Other angles include:

  1. String of Weak Jobs Reports Likely to Set Tone for Voters (NYT)
  2. Obama Promotes a Long View on Jobs (NYT)
  3. Jobs Report And Politics: The Monthly Spin Cycle (NPR)
  4. Jobs report makes it tougher for Obama to tout progress (WashPost)

As you can see, the political angle is getting heavy play. Although the Post did manage to show some concern for the actual economy in its lede headline: Weak jobs report adds to worry of faltering recovery.

The European problems feeding into the drop in markets is at least briefly discussed in this WSJ story. Here’s some more, courtesy of The Guardian.

Remembering (or not) the creative act

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This morning on NPR, Nora Ephron was remembered. Here are the opening lines of that report:

Nora Ephron brought us two of the most indelible scenes in contemporary cinema — and they’re startlingly different.

There’s the infamous “Silkwood shower,” from the 1983 movie, with Meryl Streep as a terrified worker at a nuclear power plant, being frantically scrubbed after exposure to radiation.

Then there’s the scene in which Meg Ryan drives home a point to Billy Crystal at Katz’s Deli, in 1989′s When Harry Met Sally. You know — the one that ends with “I’ll have what she’s having.”…

But here’s the thing. On the same radio station over the weekend, I heard Rob Reiner being interviewed on “Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me!” He directed “When Harry Met Sally,” and he said this about it:

GROSZ: You know, so many of your movies specifically have very quotable lines. From “I’ll have what she’s having,” or, you know, “turn it up to 11,” or, you know, how many times do you ask a waiter for something and he turns to you and he says “as you wish?”

(LAUGHTER)

GROSZ: I mean there’s so many lines from your movies that are quotable. Do you go for that? Do you grab the script and scream at the writer?

REINER: No, no, you know, you just make a movie and you put these things in. And you never know what’s going to – you know, “I’ll have what she’s having” was a line that Billy Crystal came up with in that scene. We didn’t – my mother, you know, is the one who delivered that line…

So which was it? If she were alive, would Ms. Ephron agree with Mr. Reiner’s memory? I guess when a lot of creative people get together and collaborate on something that works and is remembered, it’s sometimes tough to remember who did what.

I know I sometimes have trouble remembering, from my career, whether I came up with a particular idea — or even whether I wrote a particular editorial — because all I know for sure was that I was heavily involved in the discussion.

It’s funny the things you can’t remember, years later. For instance, when I mentioned the other day meeting Barack Obama, it got me to thinking about others I had met. And I remembered the first presidential candidate I covered. It was Jimmy Carter. I remember being excited to be there, not only because it was an exciting thing to be covering an aspect of a presidential election (it was a routine reception in Memphis), but because I really liked Jimmy, and was excited about his 1976 candidacy. I remember a number of details about the event — such as the Secret Service requiring me to take a telephoto lens I’d brought with me out of its cylindrical case, to make sure it wasn’t a weapon — but I realized I couldn’t remember whether I shook hands with Gov. Carter or interacted with him in any way.

Odd that I have no idea about that. Memory is a funny thing.

I was struck by this when I interviewed the late Ted Sorensen, JFK’s legendary speechwriter. In the video below, you’ll see him be unsure about who came up with a certain line, but generously and loyally giving the credit to President Kennedy…

Drat those computers! They’re so… stupid…

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I hope Marvin the Martian will forgive me for paraphrasing him with such liberty.

But that’s what came to mind when I saw my latest job tip.

As I’ve told y’all, back when I was unemployed, I signed up for all kinds of services that would give me a heads-up on jobs that would be a good fit for me. Or rather, on jobs that some software decided would be a good fit for me. Which is where the entertainment value lies, which is why I don’t take the trouble to get off these email lists.

Today, the very first tip that CareerBuilder.com gave me was “Head of Investor Relations.” Which cracked me up by itself. Applied to me, that is. But then, giving it a chance, I clicked on it to find the nugget, the correlation, that caused this tip to come to me. Perhaps, I thought, it was investor relations in a field that otherwise was just me all over. Here’s what I found:

[The company in question] is the world leader in the design, development and manufacture of arc welding products, robotic arc welding systems, plasma and oxyfuel cutting equipment and has a leading global position in the brazing and soldering alloys market.

You read that, and immediately my mug pops into your head, right?

Somewhere, there’s someone that job description was written for. And I hope they find each other, and are very happy. But it ain’t me, babe.

Being too ‘smart’ to see your own errors

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Bart brings my attention to this thought-provoking piece:

Jonah Lehrer’s new post at The New Yorker details some worrying research on cognition and thinking through biases, indicating that “intelligence seems to make [such] things worse.” This is because, as Richard West and colleagues concluded in their study, “people who were aware of their own biases were not better able to overcome them.” Being smarter does not make you better at transcending unjustified views and bad beliefs, all of which naturally then play into your life. Smarter people are better able to narrate themselves, internally, out of inconsistencies, blunders and obvious failures at rationality, whereas they would probably be highly critical of others who demonstrated similar blunders.

I am reminded of Michael Shermer’s view, when he’s asked why smart people believe weird things, like creationism, ghosts and (as with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle) fairies: “Smart people are very good at rationalizing things they came to believe for non-smart reasons.” If you’ve ever argued with a smart person about an obviously flawed belief, like ghosts or astrology, you’ll recognise this: their justifications often involve obfuscation, deep conjecture into areas you probably haven’t considered (and that probably aren’t) relevant, and are all tied together neatly and eloquently because she’s a smart person…

Interesting proposition.

Here’s how I responded to it…

Well, I think there is little doubt that smart people are better at rationalizing a bad position.

I’ll also agree with the proposition that it is harder to argue a smart person out of a position if he is wrong. But only because it is harder to argue a smart person out of a position whether he is wrong OR right.

I’m going to strain your credulity by using myself as an example, even though that requires you, solely for the sake of argument, to consider me to be a smart person (but hey, I consider this to be a community of smart people — dumb people would be watching TV rather than debating ideas in writing, right?).

People — smart people — on my blog get frustrated sometimes with their inability to talk me out of a position. It’s not that I’m incapable of changing my mind on something. I sometimes do so quite abruptly. But usually not on the kinds of things we talk about on the blog. That’s because I have spent SO much time over the years honing my positions on those issues. And much of that time has been spent thinking about, and one by one knocking down, the arguments that might be offered in an effort to change my mind.

It’s not that I’m smarter than any of y’all. It’s that it was my job, every day for many years, to write my opinions for publication. When you do that, you take much greater care than most people do with their opinions. (I was very surprised to realize, over time, how much more carefully considered my positions on issues were after a couple of years on the editorial board. Before that, my opinions were private, and therefore largely untested. After I joined the board, every opinion I had went through the wringer before and after being expressed, and I took greater care accordingly.) You obsess about everything that could be wrong in your position, and raise every possible objection that you can think of that the hundreds of thousands of folks out there likely to read your opinion — including people more knowledgeable than you about the particular subject under discussion — might raise to knock it down. You work through each and every one of them before you finish writing and editing your opinion piece. Add to that the fact that it won’t get into the paper until it’s been read, and potentially challenged, by other people who do the same thing for a living, and go through the same daily exercises.

It makes for positions that, once fully formed, are hard to shake — whether they are wrong or right. I also believe that the process helps one be right, but whether wrong or right, shaking it takes some doing.

So basically, I admit that I could be wrong. It’s just that the process I went through in arriving at my wrong answer was sufficiently rigorous that even if you’re smarter than I am, you probably aren’t willing to invest the time it would take to dismantle the constructs upon which my position rests.

But I do hope you’ll keep trying. I like to think there’s hope for me…